More marketing in Singapore's Little India

You know, over the past few years I've been keeping this blog, it's been anonymous. Over the same three years, i've learned to come out of my shell. Starting with facebook updates, tweets, then the company fb brandpage and company smartmob group I get consulting from.
And over time, no matter what message I'm trying to get across, I've learned that anonymity serves me little. So for now, I'll just provide some links to my other online identities, and you can sort out from there. So first, I tweet much more frequently than I blog at @walkaboutrick . Then, on facebook you can navigate to my company brand page by searching facebook for 'Really Solid Technology'. Finally, the SmartMob. What's a SmartMob? Well quite simply, I'm going about my entrepreneurial efforts without a business partner. makes it especially tough going, but it is what it is. SmartMob allows me to air out my plans on an upcoming activity or decision, and people i trust can provide their feedback to shape my activities.
That is also searchable on facebook under really Solid Technology. The product I market itself, the K-Turn, is featured on www.rstoem.com . That should pretty well cover my online persona. Now on to business updates:
Last week I had a 1.6 meter tall poster printed, and later, 200 leaflets. They all associated the hand cranked portable cell phone charger I market with an emotion , which is the feeling of helping someone. In essence, the user is taking the charger, called the KTurn, and charging someone else's phone with it who is running out of power. Emotions are very powerful things, and I surmised that the ad's imagery of a boy charging a girl's phone would be very compelling indeed, and that i would be getting calls to my own phones (as listed in the leaflets) so I could tell people which retail storeshelves to buy my product in.
Well we're at about 24 hours after the close of the ad campaign, and no calls yet. Perhaps excessively conditioned instinct by this point tells me not to expect calls. Which leads to another change in strategy.
You see, in handing out the leaflets, I had a Tamil laborer working for me for a few hours. You know, it would be more authentic if people received the ad from one of their own then from some random white guy in the middle of Little India.
Let's call this laborer Kumar. We'll call him that because that's his name and he deserves the credit I'm about to give him.
So where Kumar could have just handed out the leaflets to be people and go on, he would get engaged in conversations with them about the product. He was holding a sample charger I had given him a few days before, (he evidently had been trying it out a lot on his own because he had a lot of feedback for me) and he was demonstrating it during his one on one interactions with randomly approached folks in Little India. He made it clear that he felt he was doing better by me to talk to people instead of just to hand out cards. I decided it was lucky I had structured his compensation both on time and number of leaflets handed out, with emphasis on the time. I hadn't predicted his behavior, but I was sure happy with the result of that and more importantly, Kumar's own initiative.
So Kumar most deliberately forced me to realize that the only real way to 'market' to the Little India denizens is to have little demonstrations in public. The demos have as goal to instruct people, who've probably never seen a dynamo, how they can recharge their phones' batteries using only their own hands.
So over the next week, look for me tweeting about securing a table for demonstrating on, a space to put it up in. and hey, maybe even a microphone, amplifier, and speaker. This INSEAD is not too proud to learn marketing from a construction laborer.
Rick Sheridan